Moz takes aim at ‘golden age of search’ with acquisition of…

Moz is making its largest acquisition to date as the Seattle search engine optimization company aims to tackle what CEO Sarah Bird calls the “golden age of search.”

Moz today announced the acquisition of STAT Search Analytics, a Vancouver, B.C.-based startup that is similar to Moz but specializes in keyword rank tracking and Search Engine Results Pages, or SERP, for enterprise clients.

The deal gives Moz a new presence in Vancouver, where it will retain all 50 of STAT’s employees and plans to grow the team. Rob Bucci, CEO of STAT who bootstrapped the 9-year-old company to profitability, will become vice president of research and development for Moz. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

STAT Search Analytics CEO Rob Bucci. (Moz Photo)

The acquisition is the sixth for Moz, which launched back in 2004, and is its largest to date. It will help Moz boost an enterprise business that has grown by nearly 40 percent this year. STAT’s customers include eBay, Trivago, 360i and iProspect.

“They have the world’s best search analytics product in the market today,” she said. “Combining that with Moz’s other core datasets gives us the strongest data offering in the industry.”

Search and SEO continues to be a growing industry, even more than two decades after companies such as Google and Yahoo launched on desktop. The proliferation of mobile devices and other additional places where users conduct online searches, including inside mobile apps and shopping sites such as Amazon, has created consistent demand for SEO services. The number of Google searches rose 12 percent from 2016 to 2017, according to Moz.

“It’s the golden age of search,” Bird said. “It’s gotten much more complex and much more interesting. It’s gone from the desktop to the phone to being ambient, and that’s really exciting.”

Moz is profitable, Bird said, and expects to report $57.5 million in annual revenue this year. It will have a 41,000 customers after the STAT acquisition. Total funding to date is $30 million; Bird said there are no plans to raise additional venture capital.